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Star rating: Heat rating:

Sophia has seven days left in Tokyo before she moves back to the States. Seven days to say good-bye to the electric city, her wild best friend, and the boy she’s harbored a semi-secret crush on for years. Seven perfect days…until Jamie Foster-Collins moves back to Japan and ruins everything.

Jamie and Sophia have a history of heartbreak, and the last thing Sophia wants is for him to steal her leaving thunder with his stupid arriving thunder. Yet as the week counts down, the relationships she thought were stable begin to explode around her. And Jamie is the one who helps her pick up the pieces. Sophia is forced to admit she may have misjudged Jamie, but can their seven short days of Tokyo adventures end in anything but good-bye?

I never, ever, ever thought I’d find a book that I could relate to as much as this one. So many contemporary YA books are set in the US, with your typical American high schools. And yeah, you’ll have the ones set in “exotic” places when the characters go on holiday. On the rare occasion, you’ll find one set in a boarding school somewhere in Europe. But you see, I’d lived in four countries by the time I turned 18. I spent my high school years in Yokohama, Japan, which is right next to Tokyo. I did not think I’d find a book that not only explored the expat kid experience, but also did so IN JAPAN. So, needless to say, it brought up a lot of feels.

Objectively speaking, I guess I can understand the 3.5-star average rating on Goodreads. It’s not like this is The Best YA Contemporary In The World. It’s fairly standard in terms of being about a teenage girl with a few family and friend problems, developing a relationship with a boy, having that relationship go through some difficulties, and then having some sort of happy ending.

But I can’t be objective about this book. It was too much like my life. Hell, I even had my own interesting boy experience following my high school graduation ceremony, two days before my family left Japan forever. This older guy flew all the way from the States to see some of his friends (including me) graduate, and he and I ended up staying out all night at our own version of the American Club, lying on the grass and talking. There was even a …moment… when things could have progressed, but I was too chicken.

Enough about me. Let me tell you why I loved this book…

Because Vinesse also lived in Tokyo, she wrote about the foreign teenage experience SO WELL. The wandering about all night (because Japan is super safe), the trains, the kombini, the karaoke. GUYS, THE KARAOKE. You can’t find the experience of Japanese karaoke, or the appreciation for it, anywhere else. (The one thing missing is the last trip to Tokyo DisneyLand, though.)

Sophia was sort of your average (expat) teenager. She wasn’t perfect, but she also wasn’t a complete mess. She was really good at school, especially physics, and she wanted to study astrophysics at MIT. She also didn’t drink, and she’d never been kissed up until this book, as she’d had a crush on a friend for a while. This might make her sound too “good,” but she wasn’t perfect. She did go out all night, and she said awful things to people she cared about because she got carried away emotionally. So basically, she was me, except I didn’t like physics, preferring biology. Also, though I had a brief “relationship” in 9th grade (for a week), I didn’t have my first real kiss until I went to university, so she had the jump on me.

Family = messiness. I loved how the relationship between Sophia and her sister changed during this book. I can attest the fierceness of sibling bonds when you’re always moving around, as my brother is my favourite person in the world. That being said, we did not always get along, and our relationship went through a distant phase when he went to high school in South Africa while I was in university and then working in the UK. Also, their parents are divorced, and their father lives in France with his “new family”, which both Sophia and her sister react to differently, causing strain between them.

‘Home has to be, like, a place.’

Alison sighs and turns to the side, her profile illuminated by the glow of the streetlights. ‘No,’ she says eventually, still staring out the window. ‘It really, really doesn’t.’

On the topic of family, different kinds of family dynamics are portrayed in this book, from trusting to absent to disappointed. I know absent parenting is considered a problem in other YA books, but actually, this was very much a real thing amongst my fellow expat kids. I knew lots of classmates who rarely saw their parents and had money thrown at them, so they could do whatever. Also, everyone had a different cultural background, and in some cultures, parenting is a bit more lax.

The exploration of people coming and going in life, and the difficulty of saying goodbye, made me cry multiple times. So did all the talk about belonging and where home is. IT HURT TO READ. I still don’t really know where to consider home, and I struggle to trust in any new relationship because I’ve been conditioned to believe that everything is temporary.

‘I’m still a kid? Because I don’t want to lose everyone who loves me? Because I don’t want to spend my whole fucking life finding people and then moving on from them?!’

The limited timeframe and countdown gave this book a great sense of urgency, especially towards the end, when I started thinking there was no way this could turn around in time.

And yes, I was also all swoony about Sophia and Jamie. Especially because they originally became friends thanks to Studio Ghibli and Howl’s Moving Castle. SUCH A GOOD MOVIE.

There are probably more things I could write, but this review is getting a bit long, so I’ll stop. I’m now going to go and lie in bed, fully experiencing this book hangover and wondering if I’ll ever be lucky enough to meet the author in person and thank her for writing about my life.

So even though, objectively, I’d maybe give it 4 stars, it meets my requirements for a 5-star read because I know I’ll be reading this again and again just for the sake of nostalgia. And I think other people should read this to get a glimpse into what it’s like to be an expat kid, going to international schools and learning early on just how temporary everything is. (You know, just one of the reasons I have a therapist.) I’m going to be shoving this book at all my friends from high school, so they can also experience all the flashbacks!

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